Streamline Your Patient Communications

How MyHealthAccess saves Amari Medical Practice $45,600 annually Amari Medical Practice is a medium-sized family practice based in Surrey BC which supports 3-4 full-time physicians. Thanks to the foresight and ingenuity of Dr. Sachit Shah, Amari Medical Practice has been using Electronic Medical Records (EMR) since 1999. At the end of 2014, Amari made the decision to plunge headfirst into online booking and web-based patient communications using MyHealthAccess and it has had a dramatic impact on their business. Dr. Shah had 3 main goals from implementing a patient booking and communication platform: 1) Reduce the amount of staff time spent on the phone 2) Reduce no show rates to limit lost revenues 3) Improve patient satisfaction

Reducing 280 hours spent on the phone per year Before MyHealthAccess, Amari Medical handled all of their bookings by phone or in person. One year since implementing MyHealthAccess, Amari now books 14% of their appointments online through the MyHealthAccess portal right into the scheduler of their Oscar EMR platform. Amari Medical books just over 30,000 patient appointments per year which means over 4,200 appointments per year are no longer needing to be booked through phone calls. An average phone call with a patient lasts 3-5 minutes resulting in a yearly time saving of 280 hours (7 work weeks) for the staff. With the cost of a medical office assistant +overhead running at somewhere around $25/hr, the cost savings for Amari Medical after implementing online booking are $7,000 per year.

Slashing no-show rates by 49% In the 18 months before implementing MyHealthAccess, Amari Medical had a no-show rate of 6.58%. For a clinic of Amari’s size this rate results in nearly 2,000 no-show appointments per year which translates into a massive amount of lost revenues. In mid 2015, Amari Medical Clinic enabled the MyHealthAccess automated email appointment reminders feature which, through a series of API integrations with the open-source Oscar EMR, sends appointment reminders for all appointment bookings in their Oscar scheduler. The combination of patients booking their own appointments online, coupled with the online reminder service, has reduced the Amari Medical no-show rate to only 3.36%. That’s a 49% reduction in the number of missed appointments! Yearly, this translates into 965 fewer missed appointments. At the average revenue for a visit to a family physician of $40, implementing MyHealthAccess will save Amari Medical $38,600 in 2016.

Enabling online communication Amari Medical has also decided to enable the MyHealthAccess secure electronic messaging module for all of their patients. This module allows patients to message the clinic electronically to ask questions or send information, similar to a secure email service. In enabling the messaging module, Amari had hopes of further reducing their call volumes to save time for their staff as well as improving patient satisfaction. Historically, many medical clinics have been concerned about engaging in online communications with their patients because of fears that patients will “take advantage” of the service and it will end up taking them more time. In reality, with more than 2,200 patients signed up for online messaging, Amari receives less than 20 electronic messages per month from their patients and they have had not had to remove access from any of their patients for abusing the service. Anecdotally, the messages Amari does receive online have proven to be much more easily answered electronically in a synchronous manner than over the phone and the service appears to end up reducing time spent on the phone and increasing customer satisfaction. Amari hopes to a see a further increase in adoption of the messaging feature as patients become more comfortable with using MyHealthAccess for their secure online communications.

Conclusion Implementing MyHealthAccess has had a dramatic impact on Amari Medical Practice since its implementation. In Dr. Shah’s own words: "Over the past year MyHealthAccess has really helped our practice streamline our patient communications and reduce no-shows. Our patients are excited to connect with us online and are very happy with the service. We look forward to seeing all the new MyHealthAccess features that will be released in the future." As of the end of 2015, MyHealthAccess has reduced Amari Medical Practice’s no-show rates by 49% and saves them well over 280 hours per year on the phone. At a cost of only $99/month for the clinic to use MyHealthAccess, and an estimated cost savings of $45,600 per year added directly to the clinic's bottom line, it's safe to say that Amari will continue to be a happy MyHealthAccess client for many years to come.